[R-SIG-Mac] BLAS veclib in R 4.1

[Simon Urbanek]

Ashley,

parallel BLAS has been know to cause issues in precision, stability (when mixed with other parallel use) and rarely performance. The vecLib stub has not been part of the distribution for some time now, however, you can download it and enable it as follows:

curl -O https://mac.r-project.org/libs-4/libRblas-vecLib-signed.tar.gz 
tar fxzP libRblas-vecLib-signed.tar.gz -C /
cd /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Resources/lib
mv libRblas.dylib libRblas.0.dylib
ln -s  libRblas.vecLib.dylib libRblas.dylib

You can also choose to use the unsigned version for debugging or if you want to change its id. Use at your own risk as this setup has not been tested.

Cheers,
Simon



> On 15/06/2021, at 9:43 AM, Ashley Stephen Doane via R-SIG-Mac <r-sig-mac using r-project.org> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I would like to use blas from Apple�s Accelerate framework instead of the reference R blas in R 4.1.0.  The FAQ<https://cran.r-project.org/bin/macosx/RMacOSX-FAQ.html#Which-BLAS-is-used-and-how-can-it-be-changed_003f> indicates that two Rblas shared libraries are supplied, libRblas.vecLib.dylib which uses vecLib BLAS and libRblas.0.dylib which uses reference BLAS from R.  However, in the current release 4.1 and 4.1-patched binaries, I only see the reference blas.  Does the answer in the FAQ no longer apply?  I am on Mac OS 11.4, and installed in the default location and looking for the blas libraries here: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/lib.  I am looking in the wrong place?
> 
> Best,
> Ashley
> 
> Ashley Stephen Doane, Ph.D.
> Postdoctoral Research Associate
> 
> Weill Cornell Medicine
> Elemento Lab
> Institute for Computaional Biomedicine
> asd2007 using med.cornell.edu
> 
> 
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